To suggest you don't press anti-evolutionary views is not believable on when you clearly state that fact

"Our mistake is to look at behavior and thus evolution through the prism of Time because this compels us to find The Prime Mover. And whether it is the God of Genesis or the God of Randomness, these are both Deities in their own way requiring the exact same leap of faith and this then precludes objective inquiry on what is happening right before us."

It's obvious you are reading up on evolution from creo websites, I doubt you could get this misinformed from reading legitimate sources.

"I feel this expansion of the network is what we observe as evolution which in my view is species changing and coming in and out of existence in order to accommodate shifts within the network, in other words, the network shifts as a whole, and then species pop up to connect the new dots. I feel this explains Stephen Jay Gould's observation of evolution as a process of 'punctuated equilibrium' characterized by sudden bursts of evolution rather than it being a process of gradual, incremental change."

What you describe is not evolution, it's magic.

And carry the anti-evolution quackey on the latter with "In my model, emotion is the operating system of consciousness and it precedes biological forms."

These 'mutations' suggest to me a means by which the network could distribute genes within a litter, and thus a mechanism by extension to account for the variety of breeds, so that each specific component of the neonatal mind, the mechanism which turns energy into consciousness by reducing a frame of reference to the primordial traits of predator relative to prey, one aspect or another is highlighted in each particular individual of a litter. So the distribution of genes is not by a random process of errors in transcription, but has a 'slippage' factor so that it can be malleable according to an energetic template. In other words, the temperamental flaw of each individual will be synced up with the temperamental flaws of its litter mates, just as if they are occupying different cardinal points on a compass face. So because emotionally dogs can readily devolve and then re-evolve in sympatico with what they're attracted to (i.e. 'flip polarities') this emotional capacity to retain a neonatal mind into adulthood, is simultaneously accompanied by the the great genetic variability that makes dogs highly evolvable. In my view, this genetic capacity is directly related to emotional capacity as opposed to 'mutations' according to random influences. "

Absolute nonsense! It goes beyond denying evolution, it is an affront to physics ("Flip polarities"???), psychology and naturalism as a whole.

BTW, both essays are worthy of a Word Salad award.

"It's vital to my argument to note that the information that's needed for capturing and harnessing the energy released by change must precede the system undergoing change otherwise that energy of change is toxic to the system."

And to top it off, this perversion of the 2LT is beyond belief "The network expands, or evolves, by capturing the energy of change, which normally degrades the ordered state of systems, what's known as entropy or 'heat loss,' and then is able to turn this change into information so that the degradation of a system not only contains the seed of its own renewal but at a higher level of elaboration with more energy now available to it."

Maybe, this also belongs on the Astronomy section because I'm sure they have something to say about this bit of silliness.

"For example, the sun, the moon and the earth are entrained in an auto-tuning feedback dynamic so as to form a network, a system of energy that reliably repeats itself. No matter what the earth does, how it spins, wobbles or flips on its axis, the network has the information (the physical mass and momentum of the sun) to capture and convert these shifts into synchronized movements of the network."

first let's say that I can only agree with your first view that nothing of this is evolutionist at all. Yet this is not creationist either. A sorry mumbo-jumbo, sure. Lack of understanding of any known physics of biology, certainly when I see the quotes. But could you limit the confrontation and the insults to a minimum? Attack the arguments, not the man. I know, you do mostly that, but tone down, please, at least the guy is honest and try to argue his position and answers to our points. However we might disagree with his views, this is so much better than the average nutjob that can troll this forum (past or present), that it deserves to be respected.

Now Kevin back to you:

KevinBehan wrote:So running 1000 mph is the same as asking why there isn't a deer that looks a 1/8 millimeter higher, then another one a 1/8th millimeter higher yet, given that variability is supposedly at random in the deer genome, and given that so many animals do look upward for danger, i.e. big horn sheep, so that an effective upward gaze evolves over a million years in response to their major predator? Hardly asking deer to see to the moon. And if other animals were capable of running 999 mph, then yes we would have to wonder why cheetahs can't run 1000mph.

Once again you misunderstand the important fact: if the ability to look up 1/8th of a mm up has no advantage, it will not be selected for, and the opportunity to look even more upwards will not increase gradually. And maybe your major predator is in fact not that relevant in terms of deer populations to actually have created the massive selective pressure that might have selected for the upward look.

As for the rest and the quotes by promethean, would you care to provide us any insight in the field of emotion science and its links with evolution? You know like experimental results, peer-reviewed papers and the like. Something that would prove that the energy you are so infatuated with has any relevance in this discussion?

Patrick

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without
any proof. (Ashley Montague)

I thought this thread had run it's course so apologize for not responding in timely manner. It’s hard to imagine that being on the lookout for predators isn’t of some adaptive value, especially since increasing chances of survival is held to be the lynch pin of all evolution. Chickens look up for danger (hawks), big horn sheep don’t let wolves get above them, so it seems like circular logic to presume that if something evolves it’s due to survival adaptive value, but then if it doesn’t evolve then it doesn’t add to survival chances. I believe this error happens because the issue of how animals do what they do, is conflated with why animals do what they do. So I'm not particularly concerned with the why but rather the how. At any rate my theory doesn’t hinge on this question of deer-looking-up, although I believe this is a revealing oddity if you will. From my study of dogs in particular and animal behavior in general, I believe there is a universal protocol to all animal behavior, a template into which it must fit, and that this services a network wide agenda, and which then leads me to believe that a gene is not an indivisible unit of information. So I'm saying that nature evolves as a whole in terms of this underlying fundamental common denominator, rather than in terms of one individual and/or species in competition with another.I’m not infatuated with the notion of energy, it’s simply the most conservative and logical interpretation of the evidence and ends up squaring nicely with epigenetics, emergence theory, embodied cognition, swarm intelligence and with the general direction the behavioral sciences seem to be going. In the seventies I recognized that there was no such thing as dominance, I published this thesis in 1992 when Dr. David Mech was saying the exact opposite, and now mainstream biology is catching up, albeit absent a model with which to replace the dominance hierarchy. So you could take the peer reviewed work of Dr. David Mech as verification of a premise that I was the first to propose. Again, I don't mean energy as in something magical, but rather the basic energies that the brain and body produce, and which I believe are the bedrock of consciousness rather than genes and human reason, such as for example, genes replicating for the reason of replication. Anyone can see this protocol for themselves and judge its merit accordingly, all they must first due is to strip all notion of reason and time from what they are observing and then the logic becomes apparent.

When looking for David Mech on Pubmed, I can hardly see anything that would confirm (or deny) anything that you say. This guy seem to be interested in Wolf ecology, but I fail to see the relevance to your grand claim about evolution driven by a force beyond the individual selection.

And once again I will repeat for your deer example: any changes in an individual will propagate in the population only if it provides a strong enough advantage over the competitors in the population.So if either the physiological change necessary to allow the deer to look up is costly (head/neck structure changes might not be easy) or the gain in survival allowed by looking up is minimal (or a balance of both) then this will not be a positively selected trait.

Patrick

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without
any proof. (Ashley Montague)

I referenced David Mech only in regards to your point about peer review. In canine matters he’s considered to be the world’s foremost authority on wolves and I’m assuming he’s published many peer reviewed studies and so my point was that I argued against the dominance hierarchy before Dr. Mech, who at the time of my publication in 1992, was still promulgating the dominance model in a book he published around the same time. These days the science on the matter is retreating from that position, so conclusions derived from observation can presage peer reviewed study, and I look forward to the day when a scientist takes up some of these ideas and it can indeed be submitted to peer review. I don’t want to beat this old deer thing to death, and I understand the argument about a cost/benefit filter any particular adaptation would have to pass through to justify its propagation throughout the genome, but it still strikes me as an arbitrary logic because when an animal evolves to look up for danger, then random variability between organisms in said population is said to be well spring of the adaptation, and it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be worth the investment in changes to head/neck structure in the deer species to evolve in this way in response to one of their major sources of predation, especially since they already can crane their neck upwards to get to the high hanging fruit and particularly since that very mechanism is credited as the driving force and moderating agency of all evolution. In Matt Ridley’s book he argues that the arms war between prey and predator, host and parasite, is the central organizing principle to evolutionary change. So it seems to me that this cost/benefit argument precludes looking deeper. But again, I don’t hinge my theory on that point. There are a million things dogs do which I see as standing in contravention to evolution by way of survival/reproductive advantage fueled by random mutations; for example the canine copulatory tie comes to mind. If this is adaptive because it keeps other competitors from impregnating female (yet female can still be bred later by rival as dog breeders well know) or reducing loss of semen, then why don’t other species evolve the adaptation, for example Lions? Interestingly the social dynamic of wolves (which I maintain is not a dominance hierarchy or even the currently watered down version of” guarding of resources” hierarchy) only allows two wolves to breed, the so called “alpha pair.” Omega females don’t even come into heat and the “inferior” males don’t even approach her as the breeding female will not tolerate their advances. What is particularly interesting about the copulatory tie is that male and female are in a highly vulnerable and compromised position for the better part of an hour, sometimes even longer. So from a survival point of view this is even a disadvantage. Some claim this is a bonding moment but if anyone has ever participated in breeding of dogs, it’s pretty obvious they are not bonded by this process; both want nothing to do with the other after the long period of discomfort. Meanwhile Lions don’t have this adaptation. In contrast they deal with the matter by one lion simply killing off the progeny of rivals and then this loss of her cubs throws the female back into heat. We could say it’s therefore not worth the genetic investment in lions whereas it is with wolves, but that doesn’t seem satisfying but wholly arbitrary. Rather, the fact that social pressure has an effect on hormones, which then has an effect on behavior, and which then effects the dissemination of genes, is more consistent with a model wherein an underlying dynamic organizes all of this complexity above. So the question becomes more tightly focused on the nature of canine sociability as the wellspring of their evolutionary change, rather than any other factor such as random mutations of genes, and then their fitness adjudged by some standard of replication success. In short, any given genes’ proliferation is a symptom or effect of a deeper cause.

For a self proclaimed 'dog' guy you really don't know very much about them. A litter can have more than one sire, and the tie could simply be an adapttion that provided the first sire the greatest reproductive success. Since there are no animals that prey on wolves, there is minimal risk. Your argument is naive - it reminds me of a creationist who argued evolution was false because we hadn't developed eyes in the back of our heads - imagine the benefit of never having a preadator (or annoying sibling) sneak up on you. Also, had you thought about it, it may have occured to you that we changed the behavior of wolves to turn them into dogs. Read Price... I assume that when I write Price and talk about dogs, you know who I mean.

Maybe you didn't know but wolf packs are really wolf families.... no surprise as to why the other males don't mate with the breeder female. You can learn all about it by reading up on incest avoidance.

1) “could simply be” is a logical argument? 2) Since tie is a successful adaptation, why only canines?3) Since pack is a family group and since there is incest avoidance, why then the need for tie?4) There is no incest avoidance in domestic dogs. 5) Bears, cougars, humans, and alien wolves of other packs have killed wolves which is why they are so furtive. Lions are at far less risk of predation, one could walk up to a lion because lion would eat them, and yet no tie.6) Humans didn’t change behavior to produce dogs; dogs evolved from wolf or other common ancestor with humans as inadvertent agency.

1) It's far better that you have done so far with a slurry of foolish remarks, more importantly it is a plausible explanation in keeping with evolutionary thinking.2) Since wings are so successful, why don't humans have wings? Why are there still monkeys? I haven't met this level of ignorance since Supersport. Your path of argument by exclusion won't get purchase here where people know it for what it is. No matter how incomplete you believe the theory to be, it will not make your mystical quackery correct.3) You assume the tie only has the purpose you've stated. It could have other social, biochemical, physiological benefits that remain unknown.4) You are an idiot. Incest avoidance is well recorded in dogs and follows the same basic patterns as humans and a lot of other animals.5) Not only irrelevant but also false. It also falsely assumes that all animals have the same genetic potential to evolve like a wolf.6) Another stupid claim, not surprising since you believe dogs are magical animals.

Speaking of facts, I'm surprised no one on this forum challenged your view of incest avoidance in dogs. Dogs are promiscuous, they breed freely daughter/father, brother/sister, mother/son. In a way one can say pure breeds, line breeding and inbreeding are all based on incest.

You really post less and research more. Incest avoidance in humans like in animals is essentially the same. In short, you grow up and hit sexual maturity in a family environment (pride, group, mob, troop) you normally don't mate with them.

Go back to your delusional world where you can see energy and cure autism; something you claim to know the cause. Only a guy like you who knows so little can be so confident. It's true what Darwin said, ignorance and confidence go hand in hand.

And since you are not familiar with the work of Price and keep making idiotic comments, here is an excerpt from a 1998 paper.

With respect to behavior, it appears that domestication has inﬂuenced the quantitative nature of responses. The hypothesized loss of certain behavior patterns under domestication can usually be explained by the heightening of response thresholds above normal levels of stimulation. Conversely, lowered thresholds of response often can be accounted for by excessive exposure to certain forms of stimulation.